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Dylan Byers

How press complaints about lack of access to Obama’s golf outing backfired

In a way, the golf dust-up, however insignificant, was a legitimate affront to Henry and the “broad cross section of our members from print, radio, online and TV” whom he spoke for on Sunday. Think of it this way: The press corps had flown with the president to Florida on President’s Day Weekend and gone 48 hours without so much as a scrap of news. Then, while kept outside The Floridian National Golf Club like dogs not allowed inside, they started reading the news they were supposed to be reporting from a Golf Digest reporter inside the club house. Many a federal case was made over that sort of behavior during the Republican primaries, to be sure.

And yet Henry and his colleagues are ultimately responsible for choosing to act when they did. How did a body of seasoned journalists familiar with the rules of the modern-day news cycle not see that this issue would blow up in their faces? How did they not think to channel the frustrations felt in Florida to a legitimate protest over a more substantive issue?

Henry tried that today. At the daily press briefing, he raised the issue of access and transparency — not in regard to the golf outing, mind you, but in regard to President Obama’s forthcoming meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. …

It was too late. As soon as Henry prefaced his question with the word “access,” Carney was digging around in his breast pocket and briefing book for the transparency talking points: 35 solo news conferences, 591 interviews, etc.

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But by choosing to raise their voices over a golfing vacation — rather than, say, a foreign or domestic policy issue — the press corps may have blown its chances for public sympathy, and even damaged its own reputation.

It’s a matter of ‘quantity’ and ‘quality’. I won’t dump Ed Henry into the same category as, say, Steve Kroft, but White House access to Obama for a interview like the one Kroft coughed up on “60 Minutes” is different from if Obnama had to sit down for a chat with some reporter from Fox News.

So Carney’s numbers are meaningless, but at the same time, they do show how so much of the media has simple squandered what little access they’ve had to the president on vapid puff pieces. And you get the feeling that, in the majority of the cases, those in the White House press corps would be perfectly willing to promise Obama they’d do nothing but more vapid puff pieces, if the White House would only grant them more access.

The press have acted like an abused wife that just keeps coming back for more since Obama came on the scene.Their blatant bias and daily tongue baths of Obama are only superseded by their lap dog press conferences that they hope ensures more access and book deals down the road.
They have sold out what little credibility they had to help their boy king “have a successful Presidency” with the result leaving citizens having a hard time distinguishing their write ups from satire at the Onion.

If Pres Obomba won’t even let the Press take a picture of him and Tiger at a golf outing how in the hell could they ever hope to get him to respond to a serious question? If this doesn’t start the unraveling of “the Most Transparent Administration in History” then we have ample proof that the US has an Official State Run Media”. Of course we are not dealing with exactly free thinkers when we deal with Liberals.